Ella Gingles was ingenuous to a fault. She answered questions put to her in cross-examination without an instant's hesitation, and with the utmost candor. An apparent discrepancy seized on by the lawyers opposing her and questions thundered at her in denunciatory tone fell flat. The question sounded subtle.
"Ah!" whispered the doubter in the spectator's row. "Here is where she betrays herself."
Then, without an instant's pause, the girl told just what happened. She had been told that she must talk out—just as though she were talking to her mother—and so she told everything. It was a difficult situation for a prosecuting lawyer.
But if Ella Gingles was ingenuous, Ella Gingles was no fool. She knew that she was on the defensive.
Still, it was not to be wondered at that the Ella Gingles case proved a puzzle to the Chicago police and the state's attorney's office. The young woman appeared to have a thorough knowledge of the pitfalls that beset young womanhood in certain directions, and to be grossly ignorant of those that girls of less maturity in Chicago might be expected to avoid.
When, in the course of her examination, it developed that Ella Gingles was thinking in the way of a foreigner in a strange place while the state's advocate was cross-examining her as though she had been born and bred in Chicago, or at least in America, the assurance of the defendant charged with a crime was remarkable.
If at any time it should develop that Ella Gingles has lied throughout, that she was never attacked in the Wellington hotel—that Miss Barrett is not guilty of the charges made against her and that the weird story of conspiracy was born in a clever brain, rehearsed and then put on like any melodramatic bit for the delectation of a surfeited public it will go hard with the girl.
Miss Gingles was gowned in the most simple style. Her fresh, unpainted face and her wide-staring, innocent eyes were of the sort seldom involved in a case of this kind.
When asked an involved question in cross-examination she half hesitated, looked quickly at judge and jury, flashed a glance of inquiry at her lawyer and blushed.
Blushing is an accomplishment. It impresses a jury tremendously. Miss Gingles not only blushed, but she wiggled. With a glove twisted in her hand, she had hesitated so long over the answer to a question involving a disagreeable answer that the most dramatic of all situations had been produced.